Frommanuscript to publication: a brief guide for economists

The aim of this paper is to give a short description of the nature of books and journals, their respective editors, and the difficult process and proprieties involved in publishing papers. It describes some of the main features of the publication process, so that readers may be in a better po-sition to make judgements about published work and writers may be, to some extent at least, prepared to face the difficulties that inevitably lie in their path. Emphasis is given to the need to deal with rejections and the often substantial revisions requested by editors. While some of the fea-tures of publishing are common to all disciplines, this paper is specifically intended for economists. ∗This paper was written in response to several requests from colleagues and graduate stu-dents. It can be regarded as a sequel to my paper on starting research and writing research reports; see Creedy (2001), substantially revised and extended in Creedy (2002). I should like to thank Veronica Jacobsen for encouragement and helpful discussions, and Siobhan Austen